


No More Intrepid Explorer

by silverlining99



Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: Academy Era, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-19
Updated: 2011-12-19
Packaged: 2017-10-30 00:07:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,010
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/325610
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silverlining99/pseuds/silverlining99
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jim is an unpredictable roommate, to say the least. Also there is a kitten. McCoy doesn't like it. Not at all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	No More Intrepid Explorer

**Author's Note:**

> Title from a Jules Champfleury quote.

In April, Jim proposes sharing a room the next year. McCoy, drunk as a skunk and in a correspondingly pliant mood, opens his mouth and says, "can't see why not."

In September he looks around at his life and swears off alcohol for good. That's all there really is to be done for it, since wondering what the fuck he'd been thinking would be nothing but a colossal waste of time. He knows perfectly well he _wasn't_ thinking.

It's become something of a disturbing trend where Jim is concerned. And _especially_ where Jim and too many shots are concerned.

Hence the swearing off.

Not that it makes any damn difference in the end.

The thing is, Jim is not actually a bad roommate when it comes down to it. He doesn't snore (generally), obeys curfew (usually), keeps his crap tidy (on occasion), and gives a hell of a handjob (in those instances when promises regarding alcohol get broken).

Nine days out of ten, McCoy is perfectly content to split quarters with him.

It's the damnable tenth days that are the problem. On those days, inevitably, Jim does something that makes McCoy marvel at the maelstrom his life has become, the silently creeping sneak attack of a whirlwind that defines co-existence with Jim Kirk. He manages, once, to cram no fewer than forty-three cadets into their tiny apartment for an impromptu party that somehow, _somehow_ escapes the notice of the resident lieutenant on duty that night.

All of which is nothing compared to the dilithium reaction chamber he builds _out of their bathtub_ because he "just wanted to give it a shot, Bones!" McCoy stares at the unholy mess Jim has made of the bathroom, sends up a brief and vehement prayer of thanks that it constitutes one of his rare failures, and storms down to the athletic facilities to take a shower far removed from explosive substances.

Sometimes, just sometimes, McCoy fears that his friendship will Jim will actually be the death of him.

 

On the last day of fall term, Jim bounds into their room, stops short at the sight of McCoy, and turns on his heel to bolt.

"Jim!" McCoy hollers, without moving a muscle from his exhausted sprawl on his bed. "Get your ass in here and 'fess up already."

For a few seconds, he thinks Jim might have actually escaped in an uncharacteristic fit of cowardice. But then there's a shuffle of feet and Jim lurches back around the corner with a fragrant monstrosity of green clutched in his hand. "I got us a tree!" he announces brightly, and deposits the scraggly thing on his dresser.

McCoy sits up slowly and rubs his temples. "Trees go on the _outside_ , Jim."

"Don't be like that," Jim says absently, his back turned, uniform jacket pulled tight across his shoulders. "It's -- ow, hey, geez -- um, we'll decorate it. For the holidays. It'll be -- _shit_ \-- great."

"Christ, Jim, did you give yourself a splinter or something? C'mere, lemme look."

"No, I'm -- ah, fuck, not the nipple, dude!" As McCoy stares in growing horror and consternation, Jim breaks into a weird, shimmying dance, a full body twitch and roll that has him stumbling and squirming his way across the room and _batting_ at himself until he suddenly flings something in McCoy's general direction.

Something that is tiny and fuzzy and has goddamn _claws_ that hook sharply into McCoy's shirt and dig into his flesh in fiery jabs of unholy hell. "What the everloving -- "

Jim scurries forward and rescues the blob of fur before McCoy can detach it and hurl it at a wall. "Hey, be careful!" He lifts the thing up to his chin, cradled in the cup of his palms, and _coos_ at it. "Shh, little guy. It's okay, you just surprised him. Bones, look. I got us a kitten, too."

McCoy glares.

Jim smiles sheepishly.

The cat meows and takes a stunningly reckless leap out of Jim's hands -- right back onto McCoy's chest.

"Hey, awesome," Jim says. "He likes you."

 

 

"No," McCoy says flatly, while Jim changes his clothes.

He carefully plucks the kitten from its deathgrip on his shirt and deposits it on the floor -- then scoops it right back up when it makes a beeline for one of his boots and starts gnawing on the lace. "No," he says again, right into its striped face.

It meows pitifully, goes cross-eyed, and licks its nose. "Don't give me that," McCoy adds sternly. "I mean it. That is not for you."

"I'll get him some toys," Jim says absently, sifting through the scattered detritus on his dresser in an apparent search for stray credits.

"You'll _get_ him a home," McCoy growls. He sets the kitten on his lap and holds it there under a firm hand to spare his belongings any wanton destruction. Its fur is soft as tufted cotton under his fingertips, and he can feel its heart beating a mile a minute. "Elsewhere."

"He has a home, Bones. Here. He's ours; I got him for us." Jim tugs on a jacket. "Okay, food...toys...anything else you can think of?"

Warmth blossoms against McCoy's leg at precisely the same moment Jim's casual comment makes something similar happen in the vicinity of his heart. He looks down in horror at the dark stain spreading rapidly across his pants. "Litter," he says weakly. The cat blinks up at him with sleepy, narrowed eyes, then removes itself from its own mess with a quick scramble back up McCoy's torso. It stops, trembling, when it has a good (and painful) grip on his shoulder. "For the love of god, Jim, get some damn litter."

Jim grins. "You got it."

 

The cat takes surprisingly well to being corralled on a bed -- _Jim's_ bed -- and nestled into a fortress of pillows. It turns in a few circles, kicks a leg up and spends a good minute licking its genital area, and then tucks itself into the smallest imaginable ball and falls asleep with one paw curled over its scrunched up face.

McCoy rolls his eyes and goes to change his pants.

When he returns from cleaning himself up, he stands at the end of Jim's bed and stares balefully at the blissfully sleeping creature. It is, he has to admit, not an altogether _un_ cute specimen of feline; it's a tiny little shock of orange with blotches of snowy white, including four socks of identical length, and might as well have been passed through an electrical current for how wild its fur is. While he watches, it twists and stretches in its sleep, and finally settles with its face jammed under one of the pillows. The thing is actually somewhat sickeningly adorable.

Except for introducing itself by _urinating_ on him.

"That's the last time I clean up after you, you monster," McCoy mutters.

Just so the rules are clear, and all.

Jim is gone for a long time, time McCoy spends sitting up in his bed and catching up on some journal reading he's been putting off as a low priority during the semester. At some point he gets the eerie feeling that he's being watched, and lifts his gaze to find out that he actually _is_. A tiny, tiger-striped face has peeked up over the pillow, framed by two paws, and as McCoy glares the kitten pushes up, yawns, and finally blithely scampers over the barrier, onto the floor, and right up onto his bed.

It sits there, tail waving lazily across the comforter, gazing at him. "Shoo," he tries. He points to Jim's bed. "You live over there."

The cat stretches out alongside his leg and goes back to sleep.

"Damn it," McCoy mutters. "Just so you know, I was about to take a leak."

A contented little snuffle is his only response.

He supposes he might be able to hold it for awhile.

 

 

Jim, it turns out, is a fairly conscientious pet owner. McCoy is not naive enough to take this as a given based on Jim's earnest nodding during his lecture --

 _"I swear to god, Jim, that thing is your responsibility. I will not feed it, I will not water it, I will not take it to the vet, and I will_ not _under any circumstances lift one finger to keep that unsanitary pit of bacteria in the bathroom in a moderately hygienic state. You will do all of that, do you understand me?"_

\-- but instead makes his determinations based on concrete observations.

Jim litter trains the damn thing, for one, and makes sure the box is tidy and that the bathroom doesn't reek. For that reason and that reason alone, McCoy doesn't put the cat out on its ear -- with Jim following close on its tail. There's always food and fresh water in the little bowls Jim sets out next to his dresser, and once or twice Jim totes it off, mewling in protest, and comes back babbling about vaccinations and fecal samples.

McCoy takes the lack of tears or pouting to mean the cat is healthy and declines to inquire further.

For a week or so, in fact, it's like the cat isn't even there. Beyond it _being_ there, at least, and beyond the odd bit of entertainment to be found by sometimes stumbling across Jim sitting cross-legged on the floor, tickling its belly and babbling in gibberish while the kitten makes mincemeat out of his fingers. Mostly it's just a _thing_. It sits there. It sleeps. It grooms.

It creeps him the hell out when he catches it watching he and Jim...do things, but on the other hand it refrains from peeing on him again.

He decides he should probably take his victories where he can get them.

"Does that thing have a name yet?" he finally asks, watching the kitten stare in rapture at the sparkling lights Jim has wrapped around his ridiculous little holiday tree and, thank god, had the foresight to keep far removed from the cat's range of access.

Jim looks up from his PADD. "Huh? Oh. No, not yet."

"What the hell do you call it, then?" McCoy demands. He can't, for the life of him, recall ever taking note of anything resembling a _name_ in all the crap Jim coos in the cat's direction.

"Kitty," Jim says, like it's the most obvious thing in the world.

"That's not a name, it's a diminutive -- and an obnoxious one at that." McCoy frowns at the cat. "Name him, Jim. If we're keeping him, he deserves a name."

McCoy fails to understand why Jim stares at him for the longest time, a smile tugging at his mouth.

 

 

Inevitably, there comes a night when Jim does not come home. Instead, McCoy gets a text near midnight.

 _booze bad. Floor comfrotable. pretty plz watch Hercules just once?_

 _Hercules?_

 _he's mah manly man, Bones. RAWR._

McCoy raises an incredulous eyebrow in the cat's direction. He's sleeping on Jim's pillow, paws twitching slightly. The very tip of his perfectly pink tongue is peeking out the front of his mouth. _Sure, whatever you say._ he sends back, and flicks off the lights to go to sleep.

He wakes with a tail in his mouth and Hercules wrapped around the back of his head. "For the love of..." he mutters groggily, spitting dryly after he swats the offending appendage away. It curls gracefully around his neck instead, the cat utterly unperturbed, and McCoy sighs. "I'm killing your owner in the morning, cat."

From there it's all downhill. Hercules wakes him at least once a night, whether Jim is present and accounted for or not. The second night McCoy wakes up sprawed on his back with pinpricks of pain flashing out from being _kneaded_ , and on the third night the godforsaken creature jumps _on his face_ in a clear and exuberant invitation to play.

At four in the morning. McCoy groans, offers one set of fingers for licking and the other for scritching, and goes back to sleep. He doesn't mention it to Jim, who sleeps like the dead and goes right on, apparently, assuming that Hercules sleeps in his own bed every night, moving only to select some new spot around Jim's body.

McCoy is...not entirely sure why he doesn't care to illuminate the truth of the situation.

Which is that, for reasons McCoy cannot discern and figures are best left as mysteries of the feline mind and universe alike -- the idiotic cat has undertaken a mission to seduce the living hell out of him.

It's the only explanation, he decides after much deliberation. He and Hercules, he realizes, are acting out an age old story and Hercules, damn him, absolutely refuses to abide by the very clear NO CATS ALLOWED signs McCoy tried to erect around his treehouse. Side of the room. _Whatever_.

And frankly, McCoy blames Jim. _Jim_ , who so took to his new role of provider, of caretaker, that the stupid little creature has been fed a non-stop diet of reassurance that he _is_ in fact the most irresistable thing ever to wander the earth on four legs. McCoy, simply by virtue of failing to alter a single damn facet of his existence, has broken the single most important rule that guides Hercules' life: all shall love him.

Or despair.

McCoy is so screwed.

 

 

The winter break ends. In January the tree on Jim's dresser disappears.

The other wildlife in their room remains.

McCoy returns home from the first day of the spring session with trepidation in his heart, unapologetic in his doubt that an animal driven by instinct and unaccustomed to being left alone for more than a few hours at a time could _possibly_ have resisted the urge to tear his environment to shreds when unattended for the entire damn day.

And yet.

Hercules is fast asleep on his pillow when McCoy walks in, and everything appears to be in order. There is a minor incident in which McCoy nearly _breaks his goddamn neck_ after Hercules wakes and immediately zooms over to twine around his calves at the same time as McCoy is trying to change out of his clinic uniform, but.

No harm, no foul. McCoy tugs on a t-shirt and scoops the cat up from the floor, rubs a thumb idly behind one ear and chuckles at the contented mewl and drooping eyes that gets him. "Don't get used to it," he scolds lightly, holding the tiny body close against his chest as he crawls into bed. "You may have slept all day but _I_ am exhausted."

He falls asleep with his fingers combing through the wild scruff on the back of Hercules' neck and the steady lull of a deep purr in his ears.

He opens his eyes at the sound of Jim ordering the lights to twenty percent. "Huh?" he mutters, blinking groggily.

Jim peers down at him from the side of the bed. "Should I be jealous?" he asks.

McCoy takes a good few seconds to figure out what the hell Jim is talking about, then curls his arm protectively around the ball of fur snuggled into the space beneath his chin. "Of who?" he says, and lets his eyes slip shut again.

Jim's laugh is soft and forgiving. "Honestly not sure, Bones."

 

 

The next time McCoy wakes, Hercules has miraculously transformed into six plus feet of human male with less attention to grooming. Jim is asleep on his stomach and drooling all over one of McCoy's pillows, one arm slung low and heavy across McCoy's torso. "What the hell, Jim," McCoy grunts, and shoves his arm off.

Jim snorts awake and puts it right back. "Herc went to stalk shadows," he mumbles. "You looked lonely."

"Bullshit. I was asleep."

"Ugh, fine. He looked comfy so I stole his spot." Jim yawns and shifts closer, adds a leg to the equation of weight keeping McCoy in place. After a long, quiet minute broken only by the soft sounds of breathing and the crunch of tiny teeth cracking cat food, he rubs his unshaven cheek against McCoy's arm. "Hey. Wanna?"

"I hope you're more articulate in front of instructors," McCoy says dryly, but he shifts to his side and meets Jim's lips with his own, content enough to ignore the staleness of morning breath in favor of licking into the welcoming heat of Jim's mouth. It's a new thing, doing this sometime other than at the tail end of an evening involving at least a few drinks, but McCoy finds quickly that it feels like nothing so much as _right_. "I have class soon," he murmurs with regret, when Jim's leg pushes between his.

Jim grins and bites his lip. "So be quick, is what you're saying?"

"Be something that doesn't start my day with demerits, how about?" But McCoy softens the sharp retort with a quick rub of his bristled chin to Jim's before rolling onto his back.

He's just hooked his thumbs into his shorts and is lifting his hips to shove them down when Hercules hops up onto the bed. The cat climbs right over his chest to flop down in the close, warm space between his body and Jim. "Herc!" Jim complains. "Timing, dude!"

McCoy pushes up onto one elbow and stares at the Hercules, sprawled on his back with his belly exposed in invitation. He laughs and gives it a swift tickle. "Guess breakfast is over," he drawls. "I gotta get a shower anyway. Raincheck, Jim."

Jim groans. "You," he grouses, and scoops Hercules up to set on his stomach and massage his gums, "are a cockblocking life ruiner. If you weren't so awesome I'd hate your guts."

With a snort, McCoy rolls out of bed and heads for the shower. "You wanted him, Jim," he calls over his shoulder. "Now we both have to live with him."

The last thing McCoy hears before the bathroom door slides shut behind him is a beleagured sigh, and a hell of an admission.

"Herc, man? This is so the opposite of why I got you."


End file.
